Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will deal with Deputy Brady's questions first. Regarding the Passport Office in Northern Ireland, the truth is that the vast majority of passport applications now are submitted online, so the physical presence of a printing press and where it is located are not anything like as relevant as they were before, when people had to come into the Passport Office and fill out forms to get their passports. It is now very much an online process, and I think considerably more than 90% of applications now are submitted online. Members might be interested to know that before this meeting I had a good briefing on the Passport Office because I was anxious to make sure I could give the committee accurate numbers and a sense of what is happening weekly. Last week, for example, 16,435 applications came in. That is the figure for renewals of passports and applications for new ones. The Department issued 20,689 passports in the same week, so we are issuing more passports than we are getting applications. That said, there are still just over 93,000 applications in the system. At the moment we are meeting our target for the number of adult applications for renewal done within ten days. Some of them are done in a considerably shorter time than that. We are setting ourselves a target that if you are an adult applying for a passport renewal, you will get your passport back within ten days. Children are more complicated in respect of the security and verification issue, but we think that by the end of next month we will have our ten-day benchmark turnaround time implemented for all renewals and new applications for both adults and children. That is pretty impressive, given the fact that we have had to ramp up in recent months from almost a drip-feed of applications coming through to now doing, as I said earlier, 81,000 in the month of May. I expect we will issue about 25,000 passports a week or something close to that as we move into this period now when many people are planning for a reopening of international travel. I think that will remind people to look at their passports maybe for the first time in 18 months and all of a sudden we will find that many people want passports renewed quickly. That will put us under pressure but we are gearing up for that in a serious way. I want to put on the record that the staff and the team working in the Department have been phenomenal when it comes to passports. This is a difficult environment to work in in the context of Covid restrictions, with many people working in very close proximity in big open-plan offices. We have everybody back working now, and I just wanted to put on the record my thanks to them for that. It has been a huge effort. They are working from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. on shifts to try to get on top of the passport issue, which we know will ramp up significantly.

We are watching Northern Ireland closely. During the past 18 months or so, during Covid, a significant proportion of the passport applications have come from the UK and from Northern Ireland. That balance is now changed somewhat as many people in the Republic of Ireland want to get their passports renewed. We will keep that option open. At the moment the focus is, I think, on delivery through the systems and platforms we currently have. There is no problem for anyone in Northern Ireland looking to get a passport or a passport renewal through the online system. It is very efficient. We also have a call line. To give the committee a sense of the numbers of people we are dealing with in terms of customer service in this call centre, the passport service is currently interacting with up to 10,000 customers each week. Our phone service for citizens has been considerably scaled up to complement the web chat service, which we encourage people to use and which has operated throughout the pandemic. This is a very busy part of my Department and is doing a really good job in what have been quite difficult circumstances in recent months.

I will let the Minister of State, Deputy Brophy, deal primarily with the issue of the diaspora. Regarding the issue of the undocumented that Deputy Brady raised, we have worked and continue to work to look at options that are available in Washington, particularly in Congress and in the Senate, to try to help undocumented Irish in the United States. As the committee will know, we have been working with proposals on an E3 visa system. I do not need to go into all the detail of that but it remains a focus of ours. There are many friends of Ireland helping us on Capitol Hill, and that is important.

We have a very good relationship developing with the new US Administration. I met both Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan as they travelled through Shannon.

One was on the way to the Middle East. The other was on his way home. It shows the strategic benefit sometimes of having that Shannon stopover available. At times, it really opens up a helpful line of communication. I impressed upon the Secretary of State the importance of a US special envoy to Northern Ireland and I think they have very much taken that on board. I spoke to Jake Sullivan about that in some detail and I think that will be a message that is passed on directly to the White House. Given the changing nature of politics in Northern Ireland, the polarisation that is there, the vulnerability there and the complexity in the context of the Protocol, Brexit and the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement, it would be a good strategic move to have a special envoy to Northern Ireland at this moment in history, and which I think would be useful.

In do not want to get into commenting on unionism or unionist parties. I would just say I had a very good dialogue with the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, UUP, yesterday. It was a direct straight-talking meeting, as one would expect. I wished Doug Beattie well. I think he is a very able politician and I look forward to working with him. The new leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP, is likely to meet the Taoiseach shortly and I expect that I will be meeting him, as leader of the DUP, shortly as well. Of course, we will have an opportunity to meet on other occasions as well in the weeks ahead - I mentioned the British-Irish Council, BIC, earlier.

In terms of the North-South Ministerial Council, we can work on making sure that we get the North-South Ministerial Council back up and running. Both unionist leaders have said that it is their desire to have a good working relationship with the Government in Dublin and certainly we are in that space as well in terms of trying to make sure that we can make North-South Ministerial Council meetings work effectively. It is a really important pillar of the Good Friday Agreement and the institutions - North-South co-operation on a regular basis.

In terms of the UN Security Council, I expected Deputy Brady to raise the Middle East peace process. Anyone who knows me knows that I have had a long-standing interest in this issue, have been to the region many times and hope to go there many more times. I, the Dáil and the Government felt that Ireland needed to be clear and vocal in relation to what we were seeing in the latest round of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. There was an unacceptably high loss of life of children and civilian populations. I was very vocal about that. I think it is Ireland's job on the Security Council to call out what we would regard as breaches of international law and where there are concerns, we call them out even if that makes for an uncomfortable political space at times. We called it out on both sides. Firing rockets from Gaza into civilian populations is completely unacceptable, is a breach of international law and needs to be utterly condemned, and is not justified under any circumstances, but also the military force that was used on a population in Gaza also needed to be called out, and was by me and the Government. I refer to the motion that we put down in relation to recognising the scale, the extent, the pace and the strategic nature of the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, in particular, close to East Jerusalem. It is difficult to interpret such action as anything but de factoannexation because of the permanent nature of that infrastructure and the growing population living in settlements on the West Bank now. It was a reflection of our assessment of what is happening on the ground, and working with many others who were also following that.

Let me be very clear. I want to have a strong and positive diplomatic relationship with others, unlike some who want to expel the Israeli ambassador and want nothing to do with Israel. Theirs is not the position of the Government. We believe that the way forward to achieve a peace agreement, a historic peace agreement that can last between Palestinians and Israelis, is to engage with both sides, bluntly and honestly. There will be times when we strongly disagree with the approach of one side or the other, and we will call that out, but I will certainly continue to adopt the approach of speaking to both sides, honestly and with an open mind. I think that is the right thing to do, despite calls for me to take a very different approach, that, I think, would be seen internationally as one-sided and therefore limit my ability to be seen as a credible voice on these complex issues. Let me tell Deputy Brady that I intend on being very much involved, at a UN level and an EU level, in trying to break a political cycle that has continued to deliver misery, hatred, violence and death for far too long. We have to find a way of breaking that cycle and moving towards a more progressive peace negotiation that can result in two states that are safe, security and, ultimately, prosperous in the future.

In terms of overseas missions, just so that the committee will know the extent of the project of expansion of the Department of Foreign Affairs footprint on behalf of Ireland, we have in the past couple of years opened new embassies or representation in Cardiff, Monrovia, Santiago, Bogotá, Vancouver, Amman in Jordan, Mumbai, Wellington, Frankfurt and Los Angeles, LA. This year, we are moving ahead with Rabat, Kyiv, Manila and Manchester. The cycle continues. We are strategically opening up, developing and investing in footprints in parts of the world where Ireland has an interest, needs to have a strategic voice and can avail of significant opportunities for diplomatic relations, partnerships and trade. We will continue on that project, which is project Ireland 2025, to double our overall global impact in terms of standing and voice.

Finally, in relation to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA, which is the Iranian nuclear deal, some people have asked the question, what is an Irish foreign minister doing heading off to Tehran for the first time in 20 years and a few weeks later, inviting an Iranian foreign minister to Dublin for what were fairly substantive discussions. The reason for that primarily is that we have a specific responsibility on the UN Security Council. We are the country that is the facilitator for the resolution that is the basis for the Iranian nuclear deal. We are committed to trying to ensure that that deal gets rebuilt and committed to because a number of years ago then US President Trump moved away from it in a robust way which obviously had a serious consequence. Ultimately, it is our belief that the world would be a safer place if we have the Iranian nuclear deal in place which provides as many guarantees as we can put in place that Iran is not developing and will not develop a nuclear weapon through robust and transparent international inspections and in return the international community is willing to remove sanctions that would otherwise have been in place in the absence of that deal. In our view, that makes sense for Iran. It makes sense for the United States, who are a big partner in this, and for the other parties to the JCPOA who are also committed to rebuilding this agreement. I would not overplay our role in encouraging Iran back to that negotiating table, and, indeed, others too, but it certainly has been a factor. That is the story of the Security Council - taking on awkward issues and speaking to people who one may have a strong difference of opinion with in many areas. It is taking on the role of an international credible country that is involved in big debates and big discussions on big global issues. This is certainly one of them and that is what we are doing.

Over time, I inform Deputy Brady, we will re-open an embassy in Tehran, probably in 2023 and in the short term we will have a representation there on the premises of the German embassy. Most European countries have embassies in Tehran. We will have a presence on the ground to ensure that we are fully informed and have channels of communication open where necessary and appropriate.

On Israel’s concerns about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA, there are also a number of countries who have real concerns about this and whether they can trust Iran as regards the threat of a nuclear weapon. Israel is obviously to the fore in that. I do not want to make any further comment on that apart from saying that any country has the right to defend itself if it feels it is threatened. As long as that happens within the framework of international law, that is a matter for Israel and for, hopefully, a new government which looks like it is developing in Israel in the past 24 hours but we will have to wait and see what happens in that regard because Israeli politics can be unpredictable.

On passport applications from Northern Ireland, I can provide the statistic to members that in 2020 we received 40,000 such applications representing 10% of the total number of 2020 applications. Some 40,000 such applications is a big number.

Addressing Deputy Stanton, we are very conscious on the ICT issue that given what has happened in our health system and the cyber attack there that our systems need to be very robust and well protected in the Department of Foreign Affairs. Much private and sensitive information is passing to this Department on a regular basis as is the case for that matter with the Department of Defence. We are regularly testing our ICT systems to ensure that they are robust. We have had attempts by people to try to access our system in the Department of Foreign Affairs which is not something that I like to say but it is reality. I suspect that there is not a foreign office in the world, and certainly not in the western world, that has not had regular attempts to hack into their system. We need to ensure that our systems are robust in that regard. I believe that they are but one can never be complacent in this space.

I am pleased to inform the committee that my Department continues to support the Fulbright Commission in Ireland to further education exchange between the United States and Ireland. We have maintained a commitment of €404,000 for 2021. The work of the commission has benefited more than 2,000 Irish and US citizens in the areas of scientific research, applied research and the arts in the past four years. With increased funding for my Department, the Fulbright Commission in Ireland has expanded in the talent that it reaches, bringing in more diverse fields of scholarship such as technology and cyber. This year 31 Irish Fulbright awardees have been selected for the 2021-2022 season. We recognise Fulbright as the pre-eminent exchange programme between Ireland and the US and it plays an essential role in building transatlantic understanding and fostering extraordinary academic and people-to-people links, which I wish to clearly state as it is important.

The news is not as positive on the J1 Visa issue. In truth, because of travel restrictions this is effectively not happening. The US Embassy is primarily focused on facilitating US nationals returning to the US and managing the restrictions linked to Covid-19. I hope that we will see that change in the weeks and months ahead as Ireland and the EU opens up on the basis of a structured Covid-19 certification system. As Ireland does that from 19 July, we will also look to not only opening up international travel for EU countries and for Irish people within the EU but also for the UK and US on the basis of people travelling with a full vaccination or having recovered from having Covid-19 in the past nine months. People who are not vaccinated will still probably have to have polymerase chain reaction, PCR, tests before they travel and may be required to quarantine as well although not in hotel quarantine unless, of course, a significant variant of concern issue emerges that we have not seen yet. I would certainly like to see and I am confident that there will be a situation that when we open up to EU travel that we will also be opening for people who are vaccinated. We must not forget that the vast majority of adults in the UK and in the US will be fully vaccinated by the time we reach 19 July and as the summer moves on, just as the vast majority of people here will have been, I am glad to say.

I believe that deals with all of the questions.